robindhood
Cadet
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2011
- Messages
- 5
I've been following the FreeNAS project for a while now. Mostly just the "drop by and see what's new"-type until recently.
I decided I wanted a centralized storage TANK in my house. As a developer and MSDN subscriber, I have a LOT of ISO images that it's really handy to keep online. I also build a lot of Hyper-V / Virtual Box VMs when I'm developing a software solution. To top it off, I live in West Central Florida - hurricanes. So I wanted a single box that could hold my data but be "portable enough" that I could pick up and put in the car if ( knocking on wood ) I ever had to evacuate.
I did about 3 months of reading, setting up VMs and testing, more reading, more Google'ing than I could shake the proverbial stick at.
What I ended up with thanks to the conversations and posts that I read on here was a ( relatively ) quiet solution that actually exceeded my needs and expectations. So I thought I'd share the outcome of the project and offer up a general "thank you!" to the contributors and posters here.
If you check out my profile, you'll see that I have a public album of images of the box I built - it's 15 drives in 9 exposed bays. There are 2 arrays in it - one is 8 3TB drives, the other is 7 2TB drives ( mostly drives I had around the latter ). Both are configured as Raid-Z2.
I know after reading that the drive sizes weren't going to get me a speed demon - but that wasn't what I was after. Just a big bulky tank 'o bytes.
The total available storage ( as you can see in one picture ) is 25.3 TiB.
My windows file copy times from it - around 95 MB/s!
I've also configured iSCSI on it for learning as well as set up a few datasets to act as TimeMachine drives to back up the family macs.
I'll get a full parts list together if anyone is interested. With shipping and everything it was around 2,200$ US - everything new ( except most of the 2TB drives ).
Like I said - THANKS contributors!
"Hood"
I decided I wanted a centralized storage TANK in my house. As a developer and MSDN subscriber, I have a LOT of ISO images that it's really handy to keep online. I also build a lot of Hyper-V / Virtual Box VMs when I'm developing a software solution. To top it off, I live in West Central Florida - hurricanes. So I wanted a single box that could hold my data but be "portable enough" that I could pick up and put in the car if ( knocking on wood ) I ever had to evacuate.
I did about 3 months of reading, setting up VMs and testing, more reading, more Google'ing than I could shake the proverbial stick at.
What I ended up with thanks to the conversations and posts that I read on here was a ( relatively ) quiet solution that actually exceeded my needs and expectations. So I thought I'd share the outcome of the project and offer up a general "thank you!" to the contributors and posters here.
If you check out my profile, you'll see that I have a public album of images of the box I built - it's 15 drives in 9 exposed bays. There are 2 arrays in it - one is 8 3TB drives, the other is 7 2TB drives ( mostly drives I had around the latter ). Both are configured as Raid-Z2.
I know after reading that the drive sizes weren't going to get me a speed demon - but that wasn't what I was after. Just a big bulky tank 'o bytes.
The total available storage ( as you can see in one picture ) is 25.3 TiB.
My windows file copy times from it - around 95 MB/s!
I've also configured iSCSI on it for learning as well as set up a few datasets to act as TimeMachine drives to back up the family macs.
I'll get a full parts list together if anyone is interested. With shipping and everything it was around 2,200$ US - everything new ( except most of the 2TB drives ).
Like I said - THANKS contributors!
"Hood"